Sayeh Meisami

This article explains three major Sufi themes of Maḥmūd Shabistarī's Gulshan-i rāz as connected by the point-circle metaphor that captures the illusory state of a circle formed by the fast motion of a point. Inspired by Ibn ʿArabī, Shabistarī employs this metaphor in his poetic presentation of the unity of being, the existential state of the human soul, and the bifurcation of religious knowledge and practice into exoteric and esoteric with its implications for the relation between prophethood and sainthood. The article explains these themes mostly in light of Shams al-Dīn Lāhījī's renowned commentary, Mafātīḥ al-iʿjāz. The analysis of some key verses on the above themes in Shabistarī's Gulshan-i rāz and the corresponding comments from Lāhījī demonstrates the significance of Akbarian Sufi philosophy in the intellectual and literary life of Persians since the late medieval times.

The paper argues that poetic methodology becomes essential to Mullā Ṣadrā because of the type of philosophical task that he embarks on. He relies on a paradoxical vision of reality as a graded unity which includes all things, but is none in particular. The poetic method also facilitates an imaginative understanding of the unity of the knower and the known that defies the subject-object dichotomy of Peripatetic epistemology on the grounds of the graded unity of existence. At both these levels of philosophical inquiry, Mullā Ṣadrā relies on a paradoxical vision of reality and knowledge that is best expressed by the paradoxical language of poetry. His use of poetry as a tool of philosophical inquiry relies on imagination both as a venue of understanding the structure of the world in a different way from the Aristotelian essentialism, and as a faculty that facilitates the formation of an alternative philosophical genre that fits the nontraditional view of reality and knowledge in later Islamic philosophy.

This is a study of Mullā Ṣadrā's arguments for the necessity of the imamate based on a chapter from his commentary on al-Uṣūl al-kāfī, one of the earliest canonical collections of the Shīʿī traditions (ḥadīth). After an overview and brief literature review of the subject, the paper shows Mullā Ṣadrā's use of philosophical teachings to prove the most pivotal doctrine of his Shīʿī faith. It summarizes the philosopher's arguments under the two categories of knowledge and existence. At the level of knowledge, the unrivaled access of the Imam/ḥujja to true knowledge after the Prophet makes him the only one who can reach the depth of the Qurʾan, hence the necessity of his existence in every age. As for the existential aspect of the imamate, Mullā Ṣadrā argues that there are intermediaries through whose existence the hierarchical ladder of creation unfolds, and he considers the Imams to be such intermediaries without whom nothing would exist.

Philosophical hermeneutics of the Qurʾān in the classical period has three major characteristics that are discussed in this paper in light of Ibn Sīnā’s work. First, philosophical hermeneutics falls under the category of symbolic interpretation (ta ʾwīl)1 rather than technical/linguistic exegesis (tafsīr). Second, it selectively chooses Qurʾānic passages that lend themselves to philosophical interpretations. Third, it tends primarily towards metaphysical and moral issues, and is, for the most part, disinterested in ideological biases. This paper examines Ibn Sīnā’s interpretation of sūrat al-Falaq (Kor 113), and has two objectives: to elucidate the hermeneutical methodology adopted by Ibn Sīnā, and to investigate the consistency between the philosopher’s understanding of evil as well as the discourse used in his interpretation of al-Falaq and the treatment of the same issue in his major and minor philosophical writings. It demonstrates that, in the commentary on al-Falaq, evil emerges at the level of “particular realization” (qadar), while at the level of predetermination (qaḍā) evil is only a latent potentiality. Ibn Sīnā, in both his commentary on al-Falaq and his philosophical texts, tries to prove that evil at the level of predetermination can be explained as intended by accident (bi- al-ʿaraḍ).

Mulla Sadra (572-1640) is perhaps the single most important and influential philosopher in the Muslim world in the last four hundred years. The author of over forty works, he sought to bring to life the whole heritage of Islamic thought, from philosophy to mysticism, and create a more flexible and conciliatory approach to the problems which seemed to dissociate reason from faith. In this wide-ranging profile, Sayeh Meisami reaches beyond historical narrative to assess the true impact of the man and his ideas. This thought provoking and comprehensive account is ideal for any philosopher wanting to uncover the life and thoughts of a man who represents the climax of intellectual tradition at a crucial point in the history of Islamic civilization.

This book is a comparative study of two major Shīʿī thinkers Ḥamīd al-Dīn Kirmānī from the Fatimid Egypt and Mullā Ṣadrā from the Safavid Iran, demonstrating the mutual empowerment of discourses on knowledge formation and religio-political authority in certain Ismaʿili and Twelver contexts. The book investigates concepts, narratives, and arguments that have contributed to the generation and development of the discourse on the absolute authority of the imam and his representatives. To demonstrate this, key passages from primary texts in Arabic and Persian are translated and closely analyzed to highlight the synthesis of philosophical, Sufi, theological, and scriptural discourses. The book also discusses the discursive influence of Naṣīr al-Dīn Ṭūsī as a key to the transmission of Ismaʿili narratives of knowledge and authority to later Shīʿī philosophy and its continuation to modern and contemporary times particularly in the narrative of the guardianship of the jurist in the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Sayeh Meisami. Knowledge and Power in the Philosophies of Ḥ amīd al-Dīn al-Kirmānī and Mullā Ṣ adrā Shīrāzī. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, pp. 227, USD 93.59. Over the last few decades the study of Shīʿī Islam has witnessed a growing interest in specific aspects and perspectives of Shīʿī philosophers and theologians. The monograph authored by Sayeh Meisami focuses on the views of two of the most influential thinkers in Shīʿī, namely the eleventh century Ismāʿīlī thinker Ḥāmid al-Kirmānī and the Twelver mystic and thinker Ṣadr al-Dīn al-Shīrāzī, better known as Mullā Ṣadrā. Throughout the five chapters, the textual comparative analysis of their thought shows how multifaceted epistemological and cosmological keys are transmitted from al-Kirmānī to Mullā Ṣadra, and ultimately become interwoven with their respective theories about the legitimacy of the Imām. Epistemology, cosmology, and political theory thus become, in the author's analysis, the fil rouge that characterize the development of Shīʿī mystical and political philosophies up to the advent of Ayatollah Khomeini and the Islamic Republic of Iran. This book explores the formation of epistemic and political authority in the Shīʿī-Ismāʿīlī intellectual tradition through the works of the eleventh-century Ismāʿīlī thinker Abū Ḥāmid al-Kirmānī and the seventeenth-century Shīʿī philosopher-jurist-theologian Mullā Ṣadrā. Sayeh Meisami's project is to present a "critical investigation of shared discursive ground between epistemology/psychology and religio-political theories" by highlighting what she describes as four major themes: 1) al-Kirmānī and Mullā Ṣadrā's shared narratives in their epistemic discourses, 2) the Shīʿī framework of their shared narratives about the origin and scope of human knowledge, 3) their shared narratives on absolute authority of the Shīʿī imam, and 4) their discourse on knowledge-power dynamics and its influence on contemporary and modern Shīʿī religious-political discourses. The author plans to do so by applying Foucault's notions of discourse-as a body of concepts and narratives that govern the relationship between speculative products-and the concept of "discursive formation" to the dynamics between knowledge and power. Having laid down the theoretical and methodological background of her project (chapter 1), Meisami begins her comparative analysis by delving into al-Kirmānī's theories of knowledge and the soul discussed in his Rāḥat al-ʿAql, where he attempts to align Shīʿī-Ismāʿīlī philosophy and cosmology within an Aristotelian and Neoplatonic framework (chapter 2). Before discussing al-Kirmānī's philosophy of knowledge, in the first pages of chapter 2, Meisami points to the relevance of the allegorical exegesis (taʾwīl) of the Quran to al-Kirmānī's effort